From Bangkok:

Friday, May 28, 2010 | 10:16 PM ET

A Calgary journalist who was shot and wounded while covering the anti-government protests in Bangkok has met the Thai man who saved his life.

“I don’t know what to tell somebody that saved my life. I’ve never done it before. It’s difficult to say. I hope when I’m out of the hospital we can be friends,” said Nelson Rand, who is recuperating in a Bangkok hospital.

Rand, who was working with the France 24 television network, was struck by three bullets earlier this month in Bangkok during a showdown between protestors and the Thai Army.

Earlier this week, a Thai TV station arranged for a reunion between Rand and Oan Thirawat, 25, the volunteer rescue worker who saved Rand.

Thirawat, who was among the Red Shirt protesters and a stranger to Rand, risked his own life to drag Rand along the sidewalk to a motorcycle and then to a hospital.

“I wanted to help him after the first time he was shot but the soldiers were still shooting,” Thirawat said in Thai. “I had to duck. I was thinking I had to help him because it’s my job.”

Rand took bullets to his midsection, missing his stomach by just a centimetre. Though he lost a lot of blood, doctors say he should recover from his wounds.

“I felt happy that I saved one life,” Oan said. “Life is very valuable.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Via U.S. News’s Paul Bedard:

CNBC Host Says Obama Sullied Office With ‘Ass to Kick’ Line
Becky Quick slapped Obama for using unpresidential language

Not everybody was pleased with President Obama’s uncharacteristic line on the Today Show, spoken in the pre-school hours Tuesday morning, that he wants some “ass to kick” in the Gulf oil crisis.

Becky Quick, who co-hosts Squawk Box with lead anchor Joe Kernen and co-host Carl Quintanilla, slapped Obama for using unpresidential language in an interview he knew would be aired as children prepared for school.

“If you’re the president of the United States and you go on the Today Show which is a morning show, where you’re going to have a lot of kids sitting around watching this, I think you choose your words more carefully,” said Quick. “Using the A word when you are on the Today Show talking with Matt Lauer, yeah, that disturbs me.

A punk in need is a Punk indeed.

Since the May 4 primary, the front page of the official web site of ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) has looked like this:

It’s as if two down-ticketers represent the whole ticket.

There’s no John Kasich.

No Mary Taylor.

No Josh Mandel.

No Rob Portman.

Not even Mike DeWine (that’s actually a feature, not a bug).

Maybe ORPINO will get around to recognizing that a potentially game-changing election is occurring five months from now. Perhaps by Halloween.

Chris Redfern must think he’s died and gone to One-World-Kumbaya Utopia.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, George Mason University economics professor Daniel Klein today notes that “self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.”

It therefore shouldn’t be terribly surprising that so many journalists do a poor job of economic and business reporting, because, as the Media Research Center has frequently and consistently documented for over a quarter-century, a significant majority of journalists are, well, self-identified liberals and Democrats.

Sometimes what passes for business reporting in the establishment press isn’t the result of conscious bias. Ignorance, as just cited, and a failure to look behind numbers, often because they fit a predetermined outlook, are also factors.

Failure to dig is definitely behind a late-afternoon rendition of an Associated Press report last week on the government’s Employment Situation Report. In it, the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa told readers the following:

With auto sales rising, Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. announced plans last month to hire. But others are still laying off workers. Hewlett-Packard Co. said this week it is cutting 9,000 jobs in its technology services division, and chocolate-maker Hershey Co. may cut 600 jobs.

Since Aversa’s report was all about the employment situation in the U.S., one would think that the AP reporter believed she was referring to U.S.-only layoffs at H-P. More important, readers really have no other choice in context but to assume that only U.S. positions are involved.

Silly me, I took Jeannine’s word for it when I spoke to someone who works for an H-P vendor this weekend. I was concerned that the job cuts might affect the vendor’s situation and that person’s job security. In response, I was told that most of the 9,000 positions involved are overseas, and that H-P is bringing back much of its overseas call center and support operations to the U.S.

That shreds the relevance of what Aversa wrote.

But perhaps I just stumbled on to information that hasn’t been communicated to the general public. Should the AP reporter have known better? I think so — at least enough to decide not to use H-P’s layoff as her example. Based on only a brief bit of research, Aversa missed the admittedly undefined foreign component of the layoffs that are to occure, but more importantly, missed a huge and largely offsetting announced employment gain at the company.

The Wall Street Journal’s June 2 report about the cuts had both elements I just mentioned:

Hewlett-Packard Co. said it plans to shed about 9,000 workers from its technology-services division while investing $1 billion to modernize the unit, as it moves to jumpstart growth in an industry that’s lagged the economic recovery.

… The company is still in hiring mode and said it plans to bring on about 6,000 additional employees, largely in sales roles. H-P didn’t say how many employees it has in the services unit or how many of the jobs being eliminated are in the U.S.

ComputerWorld reports that ” It’s uncertain what regions (of the world) will see jobs cuts and hiring in the HP plan.”

It should be abundantly clear that Aversa should have found another example of U.S.-based layoffs, because H-P isn’t it.

But she really didn’t even need to find a specific company. Instead, the AP reporter could have gone to the government’s April Mass Layoffs Report released just two weeks earlier for legitimate, grim-looking numbers (bold is mine):

Employers took 1,856 mass layoff actions in April that resulted in the separation of 200,870 workers, seasonally adjusted, as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Each action involved at least 50 persons from a single employer. The number of mass layoff events in April increased by 228 from the prior month, and the number of associated initial claims increased by 50,006.

Perhaps too grim, eh?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The worst thing that ever happened to Helen Thomas? A Democrat winning the presidency in 2008. That’s my between-the-lines interpretation of this paragraph from the hapless Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who, as noted by Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters, wrote that:

So predictable were the questions she asked that fellow reporters would practically ad-lib Robert Gibbs’s answers. Grumbling had started well before her firing that the purpose of sitting her in the front row (a prime piece of real estate in the media world) no longer seemed so evident.

Her questions were just as predictable while George Bush was around, but the most Bush-bashing White House press corps didn’t mind then.

I’d say the “grumbling” to which Stein refers began on or about January 21, 2009.

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Speaking of Stein, I don’t think I’ll ever tire of reminding readers how lazy and fundamentally dishonest Stein’s report about Wasilla, Alaska’s newspaper not having accessible archives at the time John McCain selected Sarah Palin in early September 2008 was:

• He first said that “the Valley Frontiersman, … paper’s (massive) archives are not online.”
• Then, when caught red-handed, he wrote in an update that “only a handful” were online.
• The fact is that at the time I wrote my debunking column for Pajamas Media, there were 944 articles online. For those keeping score, that’s 188.8 handfuls.
• Stein has never had the decency to retract what he wrote, instead copping out in pathetic updates about how items before 1996 aren’t available online. Palin didn’t become mayor of Wasilla until 1996, though she had been on the town’s council since 1992.
• Additionally (not in the original column), it didn’t even occur to Stein that the paper’s archives might also be fully available at the local library in Wassila or at another nearby library, where an inquiry would draw less possible attention.
• Given that McCain’s people were seen in Alaska in May 2008, over three months earlier, Stein can’t possibly claim to have direct knowledge of what degree of research Team McCain conducted.

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Speaking of things I never get tired of, there’s the occasional corroboration of what I have asserted since November 2005 with linked proof, followed during the next several years with additional proof.

Here’s the latest:

Satellite photos of a suspicious site in Syria are providing new support for the reporting of a Syrian journalist who briefly rocked the world with his reporting that Iraq’s WMD had been sent to three sites in Syria just before the invasion commenced.

The newspaper reveals that a 200 square-kilometer area in northwestern Syria has been photographed by satellites at the request of a Western intelligence agency at least 16 times, the most recent being taken in January. The site is near Masyaf, and it has at least five installations and hidden paths leading underneath the mountains. This supports the reporting of Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who said in 2004 that his sources confirmed that Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were in Syria.

Of course Saddam had WMDs before we invaded Iraq:

• Six separate reports from 2004-2005 covered stories of specific WMDs found. Anyone who wants to claim “There were no WMDs in Iraq” has to full refute all six. No one has, because no one can.
• As I noted in April 2007, The military’s National Ground Intelligence Center reported in 2006 that certain munitions found in Iraq “meet the criteria of weapons of mass destruction.”
• And of course, as IBD noted in July 2008, there are the “the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium … the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel.”
• The above item, and several others preceding it, support the notion that many WMDs were shipped to Syria. But in any event that’s just icing on the cake.

The left core claim for years was that there were NO WMDs — zip, zero, nada. That assertion has been demonstrably false for years, and continues to be so.

From Atlanta:

Jun 4, 2010 / 03:17 am

A pro-life billboard campaign called “Black and Unwanted” has been launched in Georgia to increase awareness of the “devastating” impact of abortion on Georgia’s black community and to highlight the need for more adoptions.

The new campaign is co-sponsored by Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation.

The billboard shows a teary-eyed young black child’s face on a dark black background. The words “Black & Unwanted” run across the top of the billboard while the website address TooManyAborted.com is displayed at its base.

Over 60 billboards have been placed in Augusta, Macon and Savannah, Georgia Right to Life reports. The pro-life group says that Georgia is among the leading states in the number of reported abortions performed on black women, with 18,901 in 2008 alone.

“This project is going to continue as long as women are being lied to and the killing of black children is seen as our ‘best’ way to end poverty,” explained Catherine Davis, Director of Minority Outreach for Georgia Right to Life. “Women need to know all their options and expose the lies that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers have been spreading for years.”

“Our children are our heritage, our strength and the abortion community has reduced our legacy to the status of a parasite, something to be eliminated rather than cherished,” she continued, predicting that the campaign will begin to restore value to black children in Georgia and the U.S. as a whole.

The billboard was created by Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the Radiance Foundation. He said the emphasis of the campaign on black Americans and abortion is that Centers for Disease Control figures show African-Americans have abortions at three times the rate of white women and twice the rate of all other races combined.

Go here for the rest of the story.

UPDATE: It will be really interesting to see how the press handles Helen’s retirement announcement.

UPDATE 2: A prediction I hope is wrong — Matt Drudge, center-right talkers and center-right bloggers will get blamed. Helen will be a martyr, and she’ll be held up as an example of why free speech has to be regulated.

UPDATE 3: Another prediction I hope is wrong — Helen will be on stage with terrorists and/or terror supporters with months, if not sooner.

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It isn’t particularly surprising that the establishment press is for the most part attempting to give Helen Thomas’s hateful remarks and her dubious apology a very light once-over — if they’re covering her outrageous statements (that citizens of the Jewish state of Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Germany, Poland, and elsewhere) at all.

That said, the Associated Press has engaged in a few eyebrow-raisers already.

This is the only search result I found at the Associated Press’s main web site at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time:

That’s a classic “Don’t read this, it’s boring” headline. It also confirms that the AP hasn’t considered the Thomas situation newsworthy until very recently. Yes, as seen in the related video, the question from RabbiLive was about “Israel.” But at the barest minimum, Thomas’s remarks were “anti-Israel,” and at bottom they were anti-Semitic. Any doubt about that characterization goes away when one observes Thomas’s sickening sense of self-satisfaction after delivering her opening “get out” answer.

But it got more interesting when I clicked on the AP search result’s link.

Apparently for a brief time (no longer the case), the AP had the following story up, of which I was able to graphically capture the first four paragraphs:

Flap? FLAP?

The double standard is so obvious that it wouldn’t be worth bothering with except for the fact that the establishment press and its apologists continue to deny it. When Don Imus made his remarks about the women’s basketball team at Rutgers three years ago, the AP, as shown here, didn’t hesitate to whip out the word “racist” in both its headline and content. But no one dares call Thomas’s remarks what they are.

Beyond that, the AP’s eagerness to shift the focus of the story from Thomas to the White House accomplishes what any Ministry of Propganda would be proud of. It makes the Obama administration look good for condemning something that’s obviously condemnation-worthy, even as its foreign policy moves continues to stab Israel in the back.

Well, at least the AP is covering the story now. At Pajamas Media, Richard Pollock notes that another pillar of journalism has also finally gotten around to it:

… over at the Washington Post, there is near silence. As of the this writing, searching “Helen Thomas site:washingtonpost.com” on Google brings up two articles on Thomas being dropped as a commencement speaker at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, a Howard Kurtz piece mentioning her remarks, and a post debating if Hearst will drop Thomas as a journalist.

Otherwise, the Post, which prides itself since the days of Watergate as being the “political” paper of record, is dark. There’s no initial report on Thomas’ remarks, which given her stature as a near household name, particularly inside the Beltway, are certainly newsworthy.

I can confirm having done the same search at the Post early Saturday morning, and that I found absolutely nothing relating to Helen’s hate-filled remarks.

Over at the New York Times, an advance search on “Helen Thomas” (in quotes) done at about 12:15 p.m. came back with only the two AP items discussed earlier, plus a 10:55 a.m. Media Decoder Blog post.

The Times also obviously ignored the story for three days, as did most of the rest of the establishment press.

They’ll probably figure out a way to ignore this little gem from the MSMDC blog as well:

Schakowsky: Helen Thomas ‘is awesome’

Normally it’s White House correspondent Helen Thomas who asks all the questions. But the seasoned reporter traded places on Friday with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) at the lawmaker’s annual Ultimate Women’s Power Lunch in Chicago, where Thomas was the guest of honor.

Schakowsky, who chairs the Congressional Women’s Caucus, interviewed Thomas before a crowd of more than 1,500 supporters. The lawmaker told ITK that the correspondent, who turns 90 later this year, “outlasted” her all day. Luckily, Thomas shared her secret.

“I asked her how she does it, what keeps her going every day,” Schakowsky said, “and she had the best answer: She told me, ‘Being angry keeps me strong.’”

When Rush Limbaugh tells his audience that liberal and leftists are consumed by anger, he knows whereof he speaks. From time to time, in “safe” venues, they say it themselves.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Friday editorial:

… nearly half of all unemployed workers in America today (a record 46%) have been out of work for six months or more. Normally job growth accelerates during the early stages of an economic rebound, but this dismal report suggests that the recovery remains well short of becoming a typical expansion.

(White House chief economist Christina) Romer and economic co-religionist Jared Bernstein … (said) that the February 2009 stimulus would kick start a recovery in growth and jobs. Whatever happened to the great neo-Keynesian “multiplier,” in which $1 in government spending was supposed to produce 1.5 times that in economic output?

… The multiplier is an illusion because that Keynesian $1 has to come from somewhere in the private economy, either in higher taxes or borrowing. Its net economic impact was probably negative because so much of the stimulus was handed out in transfer payments (jobless benefits, Medicaid expansions, welfare) that did nothing to change incentives to invest or take risks. Meanwhile, that $862 billion was taken out of the more productive private economy.

Almost everything Congress has done in recent months has made private businesses less inclined to hire new workers. ObamaCare imposes new taxes and mandates on private employers. Even with record unemployment, Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25, pricing more workers out of jobs. …

The “jobs” bill that the House passed last week expands jobless insurance to 99 weeks, while raising taxes by $80 billion on small employers and U.S-based corporations. On January 1, Congress is set to let taxes rise on capital gains, dividends and small businesses. None of these are incentives to hire more Americans.

Ms. Romer said yesterday that to “ensure a more rapid, widespread recovery,” the White House supports “tax incentives for clean energy,” and “extensions of unemployment insurance and other key income support programs, a fund to encourage small business lending, and fiscal relief for state and local governments.” Hello? This is the failed 2009 stimulus in miniature.

… if Ms. Romer wants this to be more than a jobless recovery, she and her boss should drop their government-creates-wealth illusions and start asking why so many private employers remain on strike.

At this point, Romer and Team Obama have to know that Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work to improve the economy quickly enough to prevent serious rises in unemployment, and doesn’t work over the longer term to bring unemployment down. This is at least the third time that it’s been proven — FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, Japan in the 1990s and beyond, and now:

That Romer et al are pushing the “failed stimulus in miniature” to which the Journal refers is compelling evidence that this administration doesn’t care that Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work. At this point, it isn’t about economic recovery (if it ever was). It’s about expanding government and dependency on it, joblessness be damned.

Where is the evidence beyond hollow rhetoric that that this isn’t so?

Expect to hear bully-pulpit blather desperately demonizing employers for not hiring more people because corporate profits have been decent. They don’t get it; until this administration does something about pervasive, government-induced FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), companies that hire as if a big expansion is coming will with rare exceptions be acting against their own and their shareholders’ best interests.

From Fort Thomas, Kentucky:

Dayton High player Ben Stull got Christmas cards from him 77 years later

When it comes to holiday giving, there are Christmas cards and there are Christmas presents. And I think we can all agree that Christmas cards make lousy Christmas presents – somewhere between fruitcake and sweatsocks.

Unless, of course, you’re Ben Stull of Fort Thomas.

Every year, Stull receives a Christmas card from the greatest coach ever to put chalk to chalkboard. The hand-signed note inside reads simply “Best wishes, John.”

As in John Wooden. As in that John Wooden.

“I haven’t gotten it yet,” Stull said earlier this week. “But he’s been sending one for many, many years.”

Stull, 92, met Wooden in 1932. Stull was a sophomore basketball player at Dayton High School. Wooden, who had just finished his All-American playing career at Purdue, was a 21-year-old first-year coach, athletic director and English teacher at Dayton.

Stull made the eight-player traveling squad at Dayton that year. The team went 6-11. It was the first and last losing season of Wooden’s 40-year career. He stayed at Dayton one more year and led Stull and the rest of the Greendevils to a winning season.

Stull said he followed the coach’s career after he left Dayton – first to South Bend (Ind.) Central High School, then to Indiana State, then to UCLA, where Wooden won 10 national titles and led the Bruins to a national record 88-game winning streak.

The two kept in contact in the 1930s. Stull said Wooden called several times around the holidays. The Christmas cards, according to Stull, began not long after Wooden left Dayton. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The Associated Press’s Mark Sherman didn’t try very hard to mask his true feelings on a couple of matters on which Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was working on during the late 1990s.

The dictionary from which Sherman is working must have interesting definitions of “unsentimental” and “compassionate.”

See for yourself in the first four paragraphs of the AP writer’s report on what is known thus far from the documents provided by the Clinton Library relating to Ms. Kagan:

So it “unsentimental” to deny benefits to trespassers who have entered this county illegally and attempting to use services they haven’t financially supported with tax dollars, but it’s “more compassionate” to allow a state to let people kill themselves.

Glad that’s straight. Zheesh.

Sherman’s shots from the hip tell us a lot more about his own values than those of Ms. Kagan. Several prior posts about Sherman by others at NewsBusters are quite revealing.

Well, at least we know, so we can be especially on the lookout for more bias in other items written by this reporter.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note:This post went up Friday at the Washington Examiner’s OpinionZone Blog and was teased here at BizzyBlog yesterday.

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One would think upon reading an Associated Press story headlined “Payrolls up 431,000, lifted by census hiring” that the news contained in Uncle Sam’s Employment Situation report today was at least pretty decent (link is to screen cap of the AP’s brief 8:53 a.m report, saved for fair use and discussion purposes; it was replaced by a longer report a short time later).

Far from it. The content in Jeannine Aversa’s report is virtually all downbeat. Here are a few key snippets:

• “The unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent as people gave up searching for work.”
• “Many private employers are wary of bulking up their work forces.”
• “That (employer wariness) indicates the economic recovery can only plod along and won’t have the energy to quickly bring relief to millions of unemployed Americans.”
• “… hiring by private employers, the backbone of the economy, slowed sharply.”

Net Census Bureau hiring of 411,000 employees accounted for over 95% of the May increase.

Consider this a “reap what you sow” moment for Team Obama.

In February, Vice President Joe Biden made a startling admission about the stimulus boondoggled passed 12 months earlier when he told CBS that its “job-creating portions are really loaded in the second half” of the program, i.e., its second year. Besides tacitly admitting to apathy about the awful climb in jobless that occurred in the first year (this from the “party of compassion”?), Biden built up an expectation that the situation would improve in the coming months.

Well, that certainly hasn’t happened yet. Today’s result, four months into Year 2, shows that the stimulus package hasn’t stimulated much of anything. Across-the-board reductions in federal marginal income tax rates and a capital gains cut would have worked their economy-growing, job-creating “magic” long ago, but an administration fixated on redistribution wouldn’t even consider those measures.

Beyond that, there’s the omnipresent FUD factor. Since Election Night 2008, and arguably several months before that, this administration has specialized in creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt among businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors. It has “succeeded” marvelously. The business community doesn’t know what to expect in taxation, energy policy, or financial regulation. Beyond that, it has seen thuggish rhetoric and behavior directed at disfavored creditors of General Motors and Chrysler during their respective bankruptcy proceedings, oil companies, and bankers, up to and including home visits by the Purple People Beaters at the SEIU.

No wonder private employers aren’t hiring as many new employees as one might expect at this stage of the recovery, such as it is.

As long as what the Wall Street Journal last November referred to as “The Uncertainty Economy” continues, job growth will continue to disappoint, if not disappear. All the deceptive AP headlines in the world won’t change that.

General Eisenhower’s message to his troops:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

– Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

The army’s D-Day site is here.

What follows is a well-done homemade tribute I found: